HaloITSM Guides
Documentation to assist with the setup and configuration of the HaloITSM platform
Using your Knowledge Base
The Knowledge Base
The Halo knowledge base functionality is used internally in the system by agents to ensure efficient resolution of common incidents, but it is also used externally by end-users on the self-service portal. This allows end-users to “self-serve” and fix their own problems without logging a ticket.
Viewing, Editing and Adding Articles
To add an article, head to the knowledge base by clicking on the book icons on the main page of your web-app. This takes you to the main screen for articles:
Here you will see a search bar and filter list, if you have the following setting set in the configuration will see the list of categories.
Press ⊕ in the top right to create a new article. Here you input the description of the common issue/question, the resolution to this and any attachments as well as the title.
The bottom 3 fields are for the tags, which are searchable and will match on the categories attached to the ticket and display in the resolution finder.
The setting below this allows you to determine which teams can view the article internally in the web-app. This is particularly useful when you have a large number of articles, as it stops technicians having to search through a number of articles which are not relevant to their role.
The last setting allows you to determine which FAQ lists you would like to group the article into.
Knowledge Base Settings
To configure your knowledge base at a higher level, head to the configuration console and click on “Knowledge Base”. This will show you the following settings:
- Enable Article Suggestions
- Matching articles will be suggested for tickets with an incident or problem ITIL ticket type.
- This enables the resolution finder to match on incidents or problems.
- Categories must match a tag:
- This tells the resolution finder to only match the category of the ticket to the knowledge base article tags, otherwise it can match on the content of the article too.
- Allow matching based on ticket summary:
- This allows matches to be made on the summary of the ticket.
- Allow matching based on text custom fields:
- Enabling this allows any custom text field values to be used to match on the tags of articles.
- Article Creation settings declare how your agents, its users, can add tickets and their resolutions to the knowledge base, this is decided on a ticket type by ticket type basis.
Adding Videos to Articles
Adding videos to your articles can be an excellent method making your knowledge base more engaging for end-users, particularly if you are looking to make your articles available on your end-user portal.
On any article (when in edit mode) simply click on the video camera icon to add a video. There are 3 methods of adding videos to articles:
- Insert a link:
- Click on the link icon and add in the URL of the video you wish to link the article to.
- Embedded code:
- Click on the HTML icon and write in the code of the video you wish to embed.
- Insert a video file:
- Click on the arrow icon and simply drag and drop a video file onto the grey area or, click to search your file structure for the video.
- When inserting a video in this way, there is no limit to the size of video you can add. However, it is good practise to keep videos short and to the point to keep viewers’ attention.
